(Michael Wiegers, Dean Young, Natalie Diaz, Lucia Perillo) Natalie Diaz, author of When My Brother Was an Aztec, joins two of contemporary literature's leading poets, Lucia Perillo and Dean Young, for a reading and conversation. Perillo is a Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winner and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Young is the current Texas Poet Laureate, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Griffin Poetry Prize. The event concludes with a conversation between the poets, moderated by the Executive Editor of Copper Canyon Press, Michael Wiegers.

Published Date: July 23, 2014

Transcription

Voice:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. This event was recorded at the 2014 AWP Conference in Seattle. The recording features Lucia Perillo, Natalie Diaz, and Dean Young. You will now hear Michael Wiegers read a poem by W.S. Merwin, who was sadly unable to attend the conference and then provide introductions.

 

Wiegers:

...to read one of his poems for him, so if you’ll indulge me. While I have his hair color, I don’t have his mellifluous voice. (Laughter) This is “Antique Sound.”

 

(Reads “Antique Sound”)

 

So, and while we’re sorry that William can’t be here today, we’re thrilled to have Lucia Perillo and Natalie Diaz joining us in this place to join you.

 

(Applause)

 

To join, to read poems and conversation, and I just want to say what a thrill it is to be their publisher and editor. So I’m going to introduce in the order that they’re going to read, and I’ll get up and introduce each one so bear with me. But we’re going to start with Lucia Perillo. Lucia’s the author of numerous collections of poetry, including...I’ve forgotten my books, so excuse me while I....so, I have to show off my authors. Her most recent book is On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths, and before that we published Inseminating the Elephant. Lucia has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Los Angeles Book Club, Los Angeles Times Book Prize; she won the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and of her writing, The New York Times has said, “To read Lucia Perillo is to learn that her hopefulness is not a matter of luck or temperament, but is fought for tooth and claw.” She has taught at Syracuse University, Southern Illinois University, and the Warren Wilson MFA program, and she’s a former MacArthur Fellow. She currently lives in Olympia, Washington. Please join me in welcoming Lucia.

 

Perillo:

I’m going to start, oh, first of all, I wanted to say that it’s a real honor to be here with Natalie Diaz and Dean Young, who are poets I’ve read and admire, and I just feel very lucky to be doing this. So the first poem I want to read is called “Virtue Is the Best Helmet,” which is a Roman proverb, and it’s a poem I wrote for my friend Vivian Kendall, who spent a lot of time in cyberspace, and so we had this ongoing argument about that value of living in a computer versus living in reality.

 

(Reads “Virtue Is the Best Helmet”)

 

“Rebuttal.” This poem contains allusions to that Auden poem “Musée des Beaux Arts.If you don’t know that poem, you’re at a loss I think, but we’re all, I think, educated here. So you can assume your teachers made you read it.

 

(Reads “Rebuttal”)

 

This poem’s called “The Second Slaughter.” I wrote it after I read The Iliad for the first time, a couple of years back, and I figured I’d have to capture it in a poem before I forgot the story all together.

 

(Reads “The Second Slaughter”)

 

I know I only have fifteen minutes so I’ll try to go fast.

 

(Reads a new poem)

 

I’d like to read a couple of new poems...(inaudible)...just pull the plug when it’s time-up, right? Okay.

 

(Reads poem)

 

And this is that last poem; I think I made it. And this is called “The Rape of Blanche DuBois.” She’s the main character in A Streetcar Named Desire.

 

(Reads poem)

 

Wiegers:

Thank you. I forgot to mention that you would be publishing select poems by Lucia in 2015, so keep your eyes out for that.

 

Natalie Diaz was born in the Fort Mojave Indian village in Needles, California. She’s a Mojave and an old member of the Gila River Indian Community. She received her BA from Old Dominion University, where she received a full athletic scholarship and helped to guide her basketball team to the final four and was named her team’s MVP. After a pro career in basketball and then a blown knee, she went on to earn an MFA in writing poetry. She’s the author of the poetry collection When My Brother Was an Aztec, which The New York Times described as an ambitious, beautiful book. Her honors include a Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize, the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf, the Narrative Poetry Prize, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship.

 

She lives in the Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she works with the last speakers of the Mojave language and directs a language revitalization program there. In a PBS NewsHour interview, she spoke of the connection between writing and experience, and she said, “For me, writing is a kind of way for me to explore why I want things and why I’m afraid of things, and why I worry about things. And for me, all of those things represent a kind of hunger that comes with being raised in a place like this.”

 

And I could say this about each of the poets here today, but what I love about being their editor is how much they are in love with poetry and are sustained by it. So I’ll stop prattling on, and join me in welcoming Natalie.

 

(Applause)

 

(Speaks Mojave)

 

It’s really good to be here, I think very obviously very lucky for me to be here with Lucia and Dean and Michael, and Oliver is around somewhere, but people who...I’m still learning so much about poetry from them, and about life as well, so it’s really luck for me to share this space with them tonight.

 

(Reads “Top Ten Reasons Why Indians Are Good at Basketball”)

 

I’m going to read the title poem from my book.

 

(Reads “When My Brother Was an Aztec”)

 

I’m going to read two more. I see Tim (inaudible) back there. That’s one of my favorite men in the whole world.

 

(Reads “Cranes, Mafiosos and a Polaroid Camera”)

 

(Camera sound) That will actually work because there’s a camera in there...

 

(Continues reading)

 

And I’ll end on this last one.

 

(Reads “These Hands, If Not Gods”)

 

Thank you...thank you.

 

Wiegers:

One of the great things about having to get up and sit back down is to report what I forgot to say the last time, and I should mention that each of them actually has a book coming out with Copper Canyon Press in 2015. So keep an eye out for each of the books by each of the poets here. And before I introduce Dean, I should say, after we’re done here I’m gonna have a conversation among the four of us.

 

Dean Young is nationally recognized as one of the most energetic and influential poets writing today. His numerous collections of poetry include Skid, which was a finalist for Lenore Marshall Award; Elegy on Toy Piano, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Primitive Mentor, which was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. He has written a book that I highly recommend on poetics, called The Art of Recklessness, even though it was published by another publisher other than Copper Canyon...(inaudible)...and Copper Canyon has been more than blessed to publish his selected poems Bender and his collection Fall Higher. Upon presenting him with the Academy Award in Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Letters noted, “Dean Young’s poems are as entertaining as a three-ring circus and as imaginative as a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch.” Young has been awarded the Stegner Fellowship from Stanford as well as fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He’s taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, at Warren Wilson, and is currently at the Michener Center at the University of Texas-Austin, where he holds the William Livingston Chair of Poetry.

 

Please join me in welcoming Dean Young.

 

(Applause)

 

Young:

(Reads two poems)

 

One of the things that happens to me when I try to write is a lot of echoes and other things that are much better than anything that I can write come through my arm and out my hand, and I was so sick of that and I decided just to write out as many of those as possible. So this poem is full of echoes. It’s called “Rough Drafts.”

 

(Reads “Rough Drafts”)

 

This is called “Believe In Magic?” It’s a question. I know it’s a corny title, but everybody loved that song, right? (Sings) Do you believe in magic? It’s Sebastian and The Lovin’ Spoonful. This refers to a rather extreme medical procedure I went through.

 

(Reads “Believe In Magic?”)

 

Wiegers:

I’m gonna have a little conversation here, and I wonder...I’m gonna start with the dancer or the dance sort of a question. Right there, Dean, you were talking about words coming out of your hand, or arm, and so I’m wondering if each of you...if you each consider poetry to be a vehicle of the body or the body to be a vehicle of poetry. And each of you has written about the human body and about its betrayals and reconstructions, its central delights and sundering humiliations. I’m just wondering if you might speak about the role of the physical body relative to poetry.

 

Who wants to go first?

 

Young:

That’s a hard question. Obviously we have bodies, right? So many of us wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom right now if we didn’t. Water. But I think that one of the things that poetry aspires to is to rival body experience. So I think it’s always in conversation with a body, one’s own body that collection of disasters is often a source of content. And also, by its shear distractibility it’s a source of style, I think.

 

Wiegers:

Yeah, I guess also I’ve heard you in particular, Dean, talk about at a certain point you want to stop writing a certain type of poem that has to do with your transplant and so is, you know—clearly in one way writing about the body is inescapable, but, you know, also it’s a subject for each of you, whether or not it’s, you know, shooting a jump shot or getting in and out of the van. Just at one point do you try to avoid writing about the body?

 

Young:

Well, for me that’s just a question of becoming bored with the subject—getting bored with it. That’s the one aspect of the body, you know. The body is the thing that connects us most vividly and it’s the biggest reminder of our mortality, and that’s the biggest inspiration. The fact that time is running out. That’s why we end out lines.

 

Diaz:

For me, writing is very much a part of the body, and I think they connected especially because of athletics, but writing is a very physical act. When I write, I move. I sweat. And I think that probably when I write early drafts, I’m talking out loud, like I want to know how the words sound and feel. There needs to be more than ink to me, so I talk a lot to myself. I move a lot. I’m kind of wandering around, and I think that finally lets me shut things down and discover something new. I do write a lot about the body, and I think the way I’ve come to know about the body especially from the reservation, I think the very first body I’ve ever loved, my great grandmother was a double amputee. So very early on, the body became a mystery to me, how it was or how it was not in front of me—things like scars and stuff, so that I think I kind of carry and filter through all of my poems that deal with the body. Even poems about the beloved I think are still really filtered through that fractured, broken body that I became so afraid of and so in love with very early on.

 

Perillo:

Oh, I think that it’s easy to object to the body, and it’s funny how it’s difficult to not have a body. There’s certain poets, like Wallace Stephens, for example, you don’t know anything about his body, and then I think, well, you know the body keeps coming into my home, so I think , “Get out of here, body. I don’t want you in my poem. I want to be Wallace Stephens, not having a body.” But I can’t…I don’t know how to construct that kind of, you know, body of work, and I think it’s a failure of the imagination on my part.

Wiegers:

Or is it just inescapable? I mean I think Stephens is...(inaudible)

 

Perillo:

No, we don’t. He walked to work every day, but he didn’t say, “I wrote this poem when I was walkin’ to work.” No. So...he didn’t let the conditions of his existence into the poem, I think because he had greater resources of imagination.

 

Wiegers:

So here’s the left-field question. Do any of you believe in reincarnation?

 

Young:

I believe in recycling.

 

(Laughter)

 

Wiegers:

Hence your heart is beating right now.

 

Young:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

 

Wiegers:

So I guess I’d also like to do something that you each hold in common, I mean beyond...you don’t hold the body in common, but you have bodies. What’s the role of humor as you see it in your poems? The other morning I was having breakfast with Natalie, and she was talking about humor as it’s referenced in Mojave and their use of language, and spoke of humor not only in terms of endurance but also misunderstanding and mistranslation, and each of you, I think...one of the many things I love about your work is your humor with which you approach things is not...to be endured, so if I can, you know, take for example, Lucia, your title poem “Inseminating the Elephant” is a very funny poem, but you’re not just writing that to get a laugh. It’s serving some other purpose.

 

Perillo:

Well, I talk about how Jack Gilbert has that poem about “I don’t write funny poems,” he says very scoldingly, and I don’t like the way humor is denigrated as being an inferior art form. Or that it’s something that only, you know, you’re producing secondary art once it gets to be funny. So anyway, I always want to combat that idea. I’m not sure how to combat it.

 

Young:

One of the...I think the greatest source of humor is the truth. It’s one of the reasons we laugh, is because we’re confronted with truths in contexts where we don’t expect to hear the truth. And I think to say the truth, is we never expect to hear the truth, and a lot of times the truth is not necessarily the bad truth, you know, but it’s the truth—we’re all gonna die. Fifty years from now, at AWP, how many of us are going to be in this room? Not a lot of us. And so those kind of truths when they are presented to us, they kind of shock us, and laughter is one of the main responses. It’s why kids are funny. They say things that are true and for social conventions or decency, which we all have to be trained in every day, we don’t usually say those things, so we hear them, they’re true, and they’re hilarious. So it’s like everything else, and in poetry it’s all about context.

 

Wiegers:

So do you think truth and loss are intertwined and loss and humor are intertwined?

 

Young:

Yeah, well also, you know, truth and finding, because you can’t lose something that you didn’t find to begin with, so...it’s all funny. (laughs)

 

Diaz:

In my community, everything is funny. For example, one of the examples I can give is I work with elders to...I work on our language, our native language. There are three speakers left, and they are between 85 and 92 years old, and I start early in the morning, so at about 6:00 a.m. one morning, I went to talk with my teacher, and we were going to record language, and he let me know that another elder was in the hospital, and we live out in the desert, so he told me, (inaudible) went out to Vegas last night, which let me know it was serious, and I said, “Ahhhh.” And he goes, “Not ahhhh, she better not die. She owes me 40 dollars.” You know, and that’s just the way we talk, and I think there’s something to be said that one doesn’t replace the other. There’s a way to hold them both at the same time, whether it’s a truth or humor or something awful, and humor, you know, you can’t have the light without the dark kind of thing. And so for me, I don’t even know if we intentionally do it, and sometimes I don’t even notice it, until someone very uncomfortably laughs in the audience, and then when you, you know when you say, my brother’s excuse was that a man fell on his knife, everybody laughs, but the real thing was that he stabbed somebody five times in the back and everybody kind of puts their head down and is ashamed that they laughed. To me that’s the way we talk; it doesn’t feel necessarily so constructed.

 

Wiegers:

I’m going to put another of our poets a little bit on the spot here. Last night I was having a conversation with Richard Siken, whose new book we’ll be publishing this coming year, I am happy to say. And he was saying he’d like to ask Dean a question that I think applies to each of you in, I could cite individual cases in your poem, but as being profoundly struck by the use of, or the sense of scale in your work. And for example, he used, “Go down any road far enough and you'll come to a slaughterhouse, but keep going and you'll reach the sea.” And then in the poem, the museum with the Greek paintings, the consideration that it might be a tinier room instead of the giant rows that you’re sitting in, and so Richard’s question was, “Does this understanding come from spiritual concerns, issues of the body, or something else?”

 

Young:

I think it comes entirely from trying to get energy into poetry. And to construct statements which have some kind of dynamism to them, and one of the ways of creating dynamism is by radical shifts of scale. And I also believe that an ant is just as magnificent as a cathedral, so we shouldn’t confuse scale and size.

 

Wiegers:

Because I also, I think similarly of, and I’ll try to remember the title of the poem, but “Come over, rise and you see the goldenrod,” the Scotch broom, in your poem, and the heart skips a beat and suddenly in that moment I find you gasping and seeing this flower and I’m wondering how you use scale in your poems, Lucia.

 

Perillo:

Oh, what is the question? Scale?

 

Wiegers:

So, the sense of scale in your work, so the idea that, you can jump off from something small and it expands into a larger way of seeing. And I’m just wondering how you use it, how you use scale in your own work.

 

Perillo:

Well, I don’t know. I think that’s the...you know we’re gods when we’re writing the poem, you can do anything you want, so it...at the same point...all decisions are artistic decisions, but I don’t want to confuse people too much. You know, I think enough about the reader that I don’t want to leave them in the dust. I think often I do, but I don’t think I am, so I want to get away with as much as I can get away with without completely loosing comprehensibility. But I think those kind of shifts are inherently interesting. It’s interesting when you’re driving through this desert, and you come across a hamburger stand with a giant hamburger on the roof. Or, you know, a bar that’s made in a coffee pot building that’s a coffee pot.

 

Wiegers:

So one last question that I would ask is that I often think as a publisher, that my job is, and as an editor, my job is to protect my poets from me. And what I mean by that is...so a publisher’s role is by nature reductive—we’re trying to narrow the scope of your vision into a commodifiable package. So, I guess I’m wondering...we can, as a publisher, describe you in nice tiny packages, you know, so: the poet with the heart transplant, the basketball poet, the poet in a wheel chair...and I think each of you just wants to be known as an artist, just wants to be known as a brilliant person. But how would you describe yourselves beyond the marketing, beyond the packaging? What would be the one thing that you would want to transcend all the other descriptions?

 

Perillo:

I just want to say that it’s also my big fear is that, you know, I’m in the package, and maybe I’m in the package and I don’t know that I’m in the package. You know, sign here, and to the outside world maybe I am the wheelchair poet. That’s my fear. I don’t know if it’s avoidable. I don’t also know if you can describe yourself, like, how would you encapsulate your work. Well, that’s not my job, really; that’s Phillip’s job, really. I don’t know what my work is like. I just do it. I don’t analyze it.

 

Wiegers:

I should say that whenever we launch on a new book with a poet, we always ask them to give us a description of the book, and every poet hates to do it. Now I’m just making that transaction a little more difficult by asking you guys: Okay, how would you describe yourselves beyond the back jacket of your work? What’s the secret of you most want to tell your work?

 

Young:

I think it would be the colophon.

 

Wiegers:

Yeah.

 

Perillo:

The what?

 

Young:

The colophon.

 

Perillo:

Cauliflower?

 

Young:

No. Not that. The book.

 

Perillo:

Oh, the colophorm (mispronounces).

 

Wiegers:

The colophon. Yeah.

 

Perillo:

What is that?

 

Wiegers:

It’s the description at the back of the book. (Continues inaudible)

 

Perillo:

Oh, I thought we were talking about a vegetable!

 

Young:

Yeah. What vegetable would you be?

 

Perillo:

That’s a good question.

 

Diaz:

A pair of socks maybe.

 

Wiegers:

You’re socks? Okay. Oh, yeah. You guys got good socks.

 

Young:

I can’t believe you’re wearing half socks, man!

 

(Laughter)

 

Wiegers:

So, I call you out, and instead you call me out.

 

Young:

Yeah.

 

Wiegers:

I think we’d better end this. Well, thank you all for coming.

 

Voice:

Thank you for tuning in to the AWP Podcast Series. For other podcasts, please visit our website at www.awpwriter.org.


No Comments